


How the Muscle, Bone, and Sinews Tangled

by Edoraslass



Series: Dirty Old Town [2]
Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gangsters, M/M, Mention of WW1 violence, this is going to hurt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-17
Updated: 2013-03-17
Packaged: 2017-12-05 13:28:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/723801
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Edoraslass/pseuds/Edoraslass
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He knows Arthur’s done everything he can to avoid this moment til there was no ignoring the fact something had to be done.</p>
            </blockquote>





	How the Muscle, Bone, and Sinews Tangled

**Author's Note:**

> Gangsters being gangsters. Period attitudes towards gay men and pretty much everything. Introspection and purposefully inconsistent dropping of "g"
> 
> Title is from The Decemberists' "Red Right Ankle".
> 
> Someone on the kink meme asked for something like "Arthur is a gangster; Eames is the cop sent to take him down", I think knowmydark said something about Prohibition Arthur/Eames, and since I already had gangster!Arthur and lurking!Eames, I figured I’d just, y’know, work all that in there. Sorta.

~*~

The strangest thing ain’t that them other two don’t try to keep their voices down; the strangest thing is that Cobb don’t give Eames a second look. Eames has been in this position before, bein’ the palooka who looms in the background threateningly (has been in this position before with Arthur, more’n once) and the poor bastard tied to the chair always, always can’t keep his gaze in one place, he’s always eye-dartin’ between Eames and Arthur.

Not Cobb, though. Cobb just stares at Arthur like he was water in the desert. 

Course Eames has met Cobb before. Cobb probably don’t realize it – just a handshake in a room crowded with Bureau men, Eames carryin’ twenty-five extra pounds that didn’t do him no favours and wearin’ a full beard to boot. And of course Cobb knows an agent was sent undercover into Arthur’s organization, hopin’ to knock that son-of-a-bitch outta the bootleg business and into the state pen, but it ain’t like Cobb knows who that man is.

Arthur knows, though. Arthur knows Eames is the Bureau’s inside man because Eames strolled up to him in the middle of the flashiest joint Arthur owns and introduced himself as “Shouse’s rat.” Arthur’d laughed hard enough to cry, had personally dragged Eames out back in the alley, beat him shitless, then had his doc fix Eames up so’s he could get to work talkin’ out both sides of his face. 

Eames ain’t botherin’ to listen to the conversation. It ain’t tellin’ him nothin’ he doesn’t already know about Arthur and Cobb. He knows they was war buddies; he knows Arthur offered Cobb a plum of a job, that Cobb turned it down, that they ain’t spoken in years and that Cobb ain’t taken any of the envelopes fulla greenbacks Arthur’s tried to slide his way. He knows Arthur’s done everything he can to avoid this moment til there was no ignoring the fact something had to be done.

Eames is payin’ so little attention that he’s caught off-guard when Arthur appears in front of him, face so blank that Eames can read it like a book. Arthur only puts on that expression when he’s tryin’ to keep himself in check. Eames has seen it only a handful of times, but he learned it real fast, cause it always means that Arthur’s limit is just a coupla breaths from bein’ reached, and when Arthur reaches his limit, Fourth of July’s gotta nothin’ on the fireworks. Just the possibility makes heat coil low in Eames’ belly. 

“Send them mugs home,” Arthur says, jerking his head towards the hallway where the low-level hoods are milling around. “This ain’t none of their business. Then you go to the car, get that blanket outta the trunk, and don’t you come back in here til I give you the go-ahead.”

Arthur’s tryin’ awful goddamn hard to act impassive, but Eames sees straight through it. Arthur put on that same act the first two or five times they fucked, tryin’ to make it seem like he didn’t give a shit, that he’s only interested in a broad, muscular chest for the power it gives him over a fella, but Eames ain’t that stupid. He knows bent when he sees it. Not that Eames has got any room to judge on that count. 

Eames figures he might oughta be worried about how easy he sees through Arthur’s bullshit, but he also figures he ain’t got a reason to worry unless Arthur knows about it. There ain’t a lot Arthur don’t know, though, and what he don’t know, he’s uncanny with findin’ out. Eames’ll jump off that bridge when he comes to it. 

Anyway right now, Arthur’s exactly the opposite of impassive about this Cobb situation, and Eames don’t quite get it. He looks at over Arthur’s shoulder at Cobb, who’s watching them like they’re a cooch show. Eames don’t know much about Cobb, only what he heard round the office; it ain’t like Arthur talks about him. Nothin’ he heard makes Eames understand what Arthur ever saw in him, what’s made Arthur bend over backward to keep from havin’ to bump off the fella. He just seems like any other Bureau flunkie.

He wonders if it’s just they were army buddies; Eames saw blokes in his regiment cling together like turtle and shell, to keep from goin’ completely round the twist. But Eames wouldn’t know what havin’ an old army buddy is like. 

He looks back at Arthur, close and hard, and offers, “You want me to take care of it?” 

It’s exactly the right thing to say. It’s exactly the wrong thing to say.

Right, because it’ll kick Arthur’s trust in him up into the stratosphere. Arthur knows where Cobb is in the chain of command of the Bureau. Arthur knows what it could cost Eames, anyone was to find out that he took out a fellow prohi. Course Arthur doesn’t know it was Eames tipped Cobb off to this place, but he doesn’t need to.

Wrong, because white-hot anger flashes across Arthur’s face at the notion that anyone’d dare try and take this from him, take away the mercy and admiration and flat-out consideration he’s showin’ to Cobb by gettin’ his hands dirty with this. Eames steels himself to hit the floor and maybe come up short a coupla teeth.

Arthur, though, he just takes a deep breath through his nose, lets it out slow, and replies, “I owe him that much.”

Eames claps him on the shoulder – though he half-expects to lose a finger for doin’ it – and says quietly, “If you say so.” Gives him one more chance to shuffle it off to someone else. 

Something glimmers in Arthur’s cold gaze, something desperate and resigned and painfully young. It flickers along Eames’ nerve endings and heats him up for reasons he can’t quite put his finger on. Arthur tilts his head sideways, like he does when he’s about to give Eames an order that’ll leave them both bloody and bruised and aching for more. 

“Yeah,” he breathes, like the last exhalation of a drowning man. “I do say so.”

~*~

Eames gets the thugs in their cars and on their way back to town; he’s slammin’ the trunk shut when the single shot rings out into the night. He leans against the car, fetches out his hip flask and takes a long, slow pull.

All Eames’ army buddies are dead. Once upon a time Eames had four brothers, but the war took care of that. Three lost at Ypres, one at that shithole piece of France, and after that, Eames bid a hearty “fuck you” to the Empire, the war, all of bleeding, ravaged Europe and deserted. He walked as far as he could go, used his not-inconsiderable charm to talk his way on the first transport he could find to the States, made himself into an American, and never looked back.

Wasn’t nothin’ to look back at. If he’d given a shit about the war and hadn’t gone along with his brothers and the boys from home because he’d thought it was going to be over quick as blinking, he might feel some sorta guilt at deserting. But by the time he fucked off, all his childhood friends were dead. All his brothers gone. And Eames without a scratch on him. Even when hauling his little brother’s torso across no-man’s land and out of the mud at the Somme, through mortars and gunfire and every other thing created to kill good Englishmen, he came away from it without so much as a torn fingernail. Influenza carried away his mum and dad and baby sister only a coupla years later, so wasn’t nothin’ back home to nag his conscience, neither. 

Eames has got no idea what it’d be like, puttin’ one in the head of someone who’d been by your side throughout the whole thing. But Eames knows what it’s like to fuck people over because if you don’t, it’s you ending up at the bottom of the river. If Eames has learned one thing over the years, it’s self-preservation. He’s honed that to an art.

He waits outside the door smoking cigarettes for fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes without hearin’ a peep from Arthur, then goes right in. Arthur ain’t gonna shoot him.

He doesn’t expect to see Cobb’s unmoving form untied from the chair, laid out carefully and respectfully on the cold concrete, arms folded over his chest and eyes shut. He doesn’t expect to see Arthur kneeling beside Cobb, one hand laid over the bullet-hole in Cobb’s forehead, as if hiding it from sight will make it truly invisible. Arthur’s head has fallen forward, as if in prayer, the nape of his neck exposed, pale, unmarred, like the rest of his body isn’t.

There’s a whole level on which Eames doesn’t actually see these things, because he’s thinking, _Now. Do it now. He’ll never see it coming._ This would be the perfect time to yank his gun free and unload into the back of Arthur’s head. He’s thought it over more’n once; has spent far too much time turning the idea over and over, lookin’ at it from every angle. 

He could blow Arthur’s brains all over the floor, and there’d be no-one to say that Cobb hadn’t done it in a last-ditch effort to save his own life. He could do it, take over the entire operation; there ain’t a single motherfucker’d put up a fight worth writin’ home about, because Eames doesn’t give a good goddamn about any of the fuckin’ idiots Arthur has workin’ for him and he’d make St. Valentine’s look like an Easter picnic. He could become the most powerful man in three states, and it’d be as easy as that. 

But the nape of Arthur’s neck gives him pause. Eames knows what the skin there tastes like; he knows what it’s like to lick sweat from Arthur’s flesh and have Arthur squirm and buck underneath his touch. He knows what it’s like to have Arthur’s hands around his dick or neck or wrists, and be denied. He knows the sharp, biting pleasure of Arthur hovering above him with that expression that says _I know you_ , and Eames can’t quite think what he’d do without that. 

Eames is pretty sure he ain’t made a sound, but Arthur jerks suddenly, as if struck, and turns only his head towards Eames. His eyes are both grieving and calculating, and Eames is unnervingly sure that Arthur knows exactly what’s goin’ on inside Eames’ head. But the only move Arthur makes is hold out his hand for the blanket. 

Arthur _does_ know him. Arthur knows he deserted, even if he don’t know why. Arthur knows that Eames is a con man, always has been, no matter how his family and the army tried to change him. Arthur knows he’s British, for fuck’s sake, something no-one else on this side of the pond knows,except for Yusuf. Arthur knows that he can trust Eames with his cock, his life, and his money – but only so long as it suits Eames. Arthur knows he should never trust in Eames’ loyalty, because Eames has lost the knack of bein’ loyal to anyone but himself.

But Arthur’s a risk-taker. He didn’t get where he is today by playin’ it safe. Safe bores Arthur, Eames don’t, and Eames knows it.

There’s a hesitation seems like a lifetime, and then Eames thinks, _There’ll be other chances._ He walks forward, puts the blanket in Arthur’s hand. Something eases beneath the surface of Arthur’s face; his fingers tighten on Eames’ for just an instant, and something very like gratitude, something vulnerable and weary flickers in his eyes so quickly Eames ain’t even sure he really saw it. Although of course Arthur can’t know it, Eames is drawn that much closer back to what he used to be. 

And Eames isn’t sure he can allow that to happen.


End file.
